ham and cheese mini-pies – an impossibly easy mini-pie recipe

I love baking. I love looking at pretty pictures of food and browsing through recipes. I love cook books – I have shelves full of them. Most times, I bookmark recipes that I want to try some time in the future. Once in a while, something really intrigues me and I print the recipe so I can try making the dish in the next week or so.

I am always on the look-out for recipes that are super quick to put together because there are days when I simply do not have a lot of time to cook. While I love spending loads and loads of time getting something right – like a good sambal balacan or a beef rendang recipe, I can only work on complicated recipes occasionally. So when I chanced upon this recipe, I was very skeptical. How can anything be so simple, and yet so versatile? Of course I had to try it out immediately – ok, in this case, the very next day!

So the following day, I bought a pack of Bisquick and a bag of Tatter Tots – they were a lot more easy to find than I had anticipated!! (I got them at Fairprice, no less!)

All I did was to mix the batter (see recipe below), spray a little oil on each muffin cup, and place a scant tablespoon of the mixture at the bottom of each cup before placing 3 frozen tatter tots (or puffs, as they are known here) in each cup. If you cannot find tatter tots, you can always chop up some hash brown into small pieces and use them instead.

Then I placed ham, corn and cheese in each cup.

Add another 1.5 tablespoons of batter over the top. And bake them.

Because I was making this for kids, I did not add any herbs or pepper. For adults, I would include some thyme, or rosemary and definitely some coarsely grounded black pepper.

That took me all of 10 minutes. Seriously, can it get any easier?

Once they are golden brown, they are done. Just let them cool in the tin for about 10 minutes before taking them out and placing them on a cooling rack so they can cool completely. These babies can be kept frozen for up to 3 months, and all you need to do is take them out of the freezer, thaw and reheat them in the microwave oven as and when you need a snack!

You can use any ingredients that you like. I have made these with roast chicken, tuna, mixed vegetables, sauteed onions, with sauteed mushrooms, cubed and boiled potatoes… and anything else I could find in my fridge/freezer. Easy, peasy. 🙂